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NeoPG Development Guide |
NeoPG is written in C++11 and leans heavily on the standard library (especially STL), Botan (for cryptographic primitives) and Boost. This means that we are pushing a lot of platform dependencies and portability concerns to these layers. Feel free to take full advantage of this.
Leveraging these high-level abstractions allows to write very efficient code, and should be preferred over micro-managing pointers or other anti-patterns.
Sometimes, it is easier to always use a strong primitive than to differentiate. For example, all random we are using is cryptographically strong, and all Hashes are calculated in secure memory. In general, this is not a problem.
We use clang-format -style=Google. The file .clang-format already
sets this. It is recommended to configure your editor to run this
everytime the file is saved.
You can run make pretty to reformat all source code lines. Some
legacy files are not stable under this operation, unfortunately.
There is no CI for source formatting yet for this reason.
Header files and unit tests are located next to the source file.
Header files are copied to build/include/neopg and
build/include/neopg-tool in a flat directory. This is a bit
unorthodox, but makes it easier to edit them along with the source
file. Integration tests are located in the tests/ directory.
We use gettext-tools (at build time) and boost::locale (at runtime)
for translations. Translatable strings are marked with the macro _.
Comments preceeding such strings are passed to the translators if they
address them with the phrase "Translators". We use boost::format to
parametrize strings with variable content.
// Translators, good luck translating this one!
std::cout << boost::format(_("%s is a trusted introducer for %s")) % introducer % subject;
Character encoding conversion is done with boost::locale::conv. Unfortunately, boost does not allow conversion into a securely allocated memory buffer, so converting passwords (to guess the right encoding) currently has a race condition where the password is exposed. This is currently only used in the p12 export function.
See: Boost Trac #13312